Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Robert Douglas. Dir. King Vidor, Warner Bros., 1949
Not to make too much of myself, but my reaction to King Vidor's 1949 screen version of Ayn Rand's novel, The Fountainhead, could almost sum up the Democratic Party's reaction to Movement Conservatism. I started chuckling within a couple minutes. That proceeded quickly to giggles, then sniggering of an almost continual quality, followed by outright guffaws. As some react to Plan 9 from Outer Space or Robot Monster, so I reacted to The Fountainhead, as one of the most unintentionally preposterous, ludicrous, and silly things I've ever seen. No one, I thought, as I laughed, could ever take this nonsense seriously. The movie's portrayal of society and public opinion as this hydra strangling the individual man, the great visionary, is so distorted, so propagandistic in its deployment, I had to laugh. Again, who could ever take this seriously?
Then Howard Roark sums up why he should be exonerated for blowing up the public housing project he dynamited after his designs were added to in violation of his terms. His speech, about great men of vision's debt to no one, sounds so much like Trump's "American Carnage" speech, in tone and spirit if not substance, like what the late Rush Limbaugh and former Speaker Newt Gingrich preached and continue to preach via Fox and Newsmax and The Blaze, daily. 75 million Americans, by their vote on Nov. 3, 2020, signaled they took it very goddamn seriously. Absent a mishandled plague, that number might have been sufficient to keep Joe Biden out of the White House, which a frighteningly large percentage of those 75 million believe, without evidence, Biden stole. Those folks took The Fountainhead's dunderheaded myth of the rugged individual so freaking seriously they heeded one such individual's call to try overturning a free and fair election on January 6. Yes, some took all this as seriously as possible, and still do, and they picked up seats in Congress in November. Their influence is not funny again because Joe Biden.
I try to avoid overtly political writing like this when discussing a film. It inherently polarizes. It cannot do otherwise. But we live in a time when it's tempting to laugh hysterically at Ayn Rand's cheerfully fascist vision of how to make America great again, and as we are still learning, immensely dangerous to do so. We laughed from the end of WW2 until 2016, certain even the trolls who clearly embrace Rand's ideals could never fully convince a majority of Americans their self-serving rhetoric deserved elevation to national office. We're not laughing anymore.
Watching The Fountainhead is like watching Wall Street, particularly scenes featuring Michael Douglas, whose "greed is good" ethos fuelled the tech and housing bubbles and, ultimately, the Great Recession. It's dazzling acting, yet so depressingly prophetic it's hard to admire it the way I did in the late 1980s. With one significant difference - Oliver Stone's film is good.
All politics aside, Ayn Rand secured a contractual promise from Jack Warner to retain her dialogue exactly as in the novel. Warner did, and as a fan of a kind of bad writing tone deaf to its own badness, I have to thank him. The idea and ideals of The Fountainhead are warped as it is - to have them delivered in Rand's allegedly deliberate melodramatic declamations makes it even more perfect. As a critic of the time said, "Every word of dialogue proclaims that the will of the individual trumps all law."
The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand's perception of the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright as the fight of individualistic vision against the conformist impulse of the "public good," posits a world in which architecture matters - well, a heckuva lot more than most of us might imagine. These people get seriously worked up over how buildings are designed and how they look. The film's sole setpiece shows Gary Cooper's architect Howard Roark dynamiting the housing project he designed, but before then industrial magnates and media barons have backed and betrayed him, elevated and then decimated his career for its willful individualism. Roark, like Wright, builds in a modernist style where form follows function while the prevailing style prefers ornamentation and adornment, buildings that "look like temples and great cathedrals of the past."
All politics aside, Ayn Rand secured a contractual promise from Jack Warner to retain her dialogue exactly as in the novel. Warner did, and as a fan of a kind of bad writing tone deaf to its own badness, I have to thank him. The idea and ideals of The Fountainhead are warped as it is - to have them delivered in Rand's allegedly deliberate melodramatic declamations makes it even more perfect. As a critic of the time said, "Every word of dialogue proclaims that the will of the individual trumps all law."
The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand's perception of the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright as the fight of individualistic vision against the conformist impulse of the "public good," posits a world in which architecture matters - well, a heckuva lot more than most of us might imagine. These people get seriously worked up over how buildings are designed and how they look. The film's sole setpiece shows Gary Cooper's architect Howard Roark dynamiting the housing project he designed, but before then industrial magnates and media barons have backed and betrayed him, elevated and then decimated his career for its willful individualism. Roark, like Wright, builds in a modernist style where form follows function while the prevailing style prefers ornamentation and adornment, buildings that "look like temples and great cathedrals of the past."
Roark's refusal to conform to current styles, indeed, to accept any compromise of his vision, turns him into an existential threat to the powerbrokers of The Fountainhead's allegorical "all work serves the public" social structure. He becomes the pawn in a struggle between a newspaper's architecture columnist and the paper's publisher, the colummist dedicated to proving his power with the public by villifying Roark's designs and methods, the publisher devoted to the principle his power, the power of ownership, is the same as Roark's vision as a creator. He champions Roark until it almost costs him his empire, at which point even he turns on Roark and condemns him in print.
Woven into this is putative, even theoretical, love interest Patricia Neal as the newspaper's housing style columnist, an early champion of Roark who falls in love with him based on his design without ever meeting him. She, of course, loves him and his purity in such a degraded society that she has no choice but to deny him herself and marry the publisher, because his greatness will never be crushed by the masses. You see, she understands that society can only fail Howard Roark, therefore she must betray him and champion all she despises because neither she nor the world will ever be good enough for such a rugged individual of architecture.
Pretty heavy, and silly, but Neal becomes secondary once Roark and the publisher, Raymond Massey's Gail Wynand, meet. From then until Wynand's tragic, operatic end, The Fountainhead is the original bromance, by an author much more sexually confident than Judd Apatow. Supposedly, Rand's "type" ran to strong, brooding men like Cooper's Roark, who proved their masculine vision by tossing a woman around the bedroom. Based on The Fountainhead, I'm guessing her desktop browser history would lead to multiple sites in which hunky, ripped, squarejawed types wrestle and dominate one another, naked and oily. The sexual tension between Cooper and Massey, with Massey's girlish exuberance for Roark's refusal to compromise clearly marking him the bottom in this great screen matchup, dominates all their scenes. They get to a point where their dialogue should read:
Massey:Howard, you are manly. Manly, uncompromising. Strong. I want you.
Cooper:Gail, you are rich. Powerful and wealthy. Suck me, bitch.
Massey:Oh, Daddy, strong, uncompromising Daddy!
If you've managed to miss The Fountainhead, but have some understanding of Rand's philisophical ickiness, you may be thinking, "Come on. It can't be that ridiculous."
I can only invite you to see The Fountainhead, yourself, at which time you will say to me that you are sorry, you didn't realize a thing could be so weird that my outlandish characterization still failed it. I see very few films so unintentionally over-the-top, so unselfconsciously pompous - and homoerotic - as The Fountainhead. I see all kinds of bad movies, and when they're done I know I'll never see them again. I'll see The Fountainhead again. Possibly many, many times. It is as much a trainwreck as any Ed Wood film, and with far loftier pedigree.
Patricia Neal, Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, and particularly Robert Douglas as scheming columnist Ellsworth M. Toohey, who all but twirls his moustache as he laughs in fiendish glee, fascinated me. The dialogue is bad, bad. Arch, fey, self-important, an endless series of bitten-off hunks of manly, or otherwise, ideology. Yet Cooper and Neal and Massey give great performances, as if this weren't tripe even then. Douglas puts on a clinic in screen villainy. Neal, so great as Alma in Martin Ritt's Hud, does Bette Davis with a more pronounced accent, so it's interesting this project was once intended for Barbara Stanwyck, a very different performer from Davis. Cooper embodies dogged determination in every twitch of his steely jaw. Massey prevaricates and wavers, his ardor aroused by Cooper's individualism, cooled by his loss of prestige when he defies public opinion. He's completely sincere and convincing, from either side of his mouth.
Back in '49, Variety called The Fountainhead's characters "deeply weird," and they are, if you try to understand them as actual people with lives and thoughts and feelings and motivations and backstories. Rand's insistence on fidelity to her dialogue, however, makes plain that these characters function as symbols and ciphers, nothing more. A talented digital manipulator could have some fun rendering each character as a moving label. Cooper would be a talking animation of the phrase "uncompromising individual," where Neal and Massey would be "the fickle love of wealth and power for men who want to use it," and Douglas "the brutality of public opinion and social contracts." Virtually every other character in the movie acts as a living golf tee, setting up the principals' motivations, actions, and words. Even Kent Smith, as Roark's architect frenemy Peter Keating, is little more than a story device with a name.
Approached from most any angle, The Fountainhead is a deeply weird movie. Whatever truth about individualism's accomplishments might exist is so hopelessly ensnared in Rand's black/white, extremist worldview in which we need great and uncompromising strong men to lead us and to act in our good by acting in their own that it's ultimately pointless to try winnowing out any message from the film that is not hopelessly, toxically narcissistic. To me, and to many like me, Rand's ideas exist somewhere between laughable and appalling.
Woven into this is putative, even theoretical, love interest Patricia Neal as the newspaper's housing style columnist, an early champion of Roark who falls in love with him based on his design without ever meeting him. She, of course, loves him and his purity in such a degraded society that she has no choice but to deny him herself and marry the publisher, because his greatness will never be crushed by the masses. You see, she understands that society can only fail Howard Roark, therefore she must betray him and champion all she despises because neither she nor the world will ever be good enough for such a rugged individual of architecture.
Pretty heavy, and silly, but Neal becomes secondary once Roark and the publisher, Raymond Massey's Gail Wynand, meet. From then until Wynand's tragic, operatic end, The Fountainhead is the original bromance, by an author much more sexually confident than Judd Apatow. Supposedly, Rand's "type" ran to strong, brooding men like Cooper's Roark, who proved their masculine vision by tossing a woman around the bedroom. Based on The Fountainhead, I'm guessing her desktop browser history would lead to multiple sites in which hunky, ripped, squarejawed types wrestle and dominate one another, naked and oily. The sexual tension between Cooper and Massey, with Massey's girlish exuberance for Roark's refusal to compromise clearly marking him the bottom in this great screen matchup, dominates all their scenes. They get to a point where their dialogue should read:
Massey:Howard, you are manly. Manly, uncompromising. Strong. I want you.
Cooper:Gail, you are rich. Powerful and wealthy. Suck me, bitch.
Massey:Oh, Daddy, strong, uncompromising Daddy!
If you've managed to miss The Fountainhead, but have some understanding of Rand's philisophical ickiness, you may be thinking, "Come on. It can't be that ridiculous."
I can only invite you to see The Fountainhead, yourself, at which time you will say to me that you are sorry, you didn't realize a thing could be so weird that my outlandish characterization still failed it. I see very few films so unintentionally over-the-top, so unselfconsciously pompous - and homoerotic - as The Fountainhead. I see all kinds of bad movies, and when they're done I know I'll never see them again. I'll see The Fountainhead again. Possibly many, many times. It is as much a trainwreck as any Ed Wood film, and with far loftier pedigree.
Patricia Neal, Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, and particularly Robert Douglas as scheming columnist Ellsworth M. Toohey, who all but twirls his moustache as he laughs in fiendish glee, fascinated me. The dialogue is bad, bad. Arch, fey, self-important, an endless series of bitten-off hunks of manly, or otherwise, ideology. Yet Cooper and Neal and Massey give great performances, as if this weren't tripe even then. Douglas puts on a clinic in screen villainy. Neal, so great as Alma in Martin Ritt's Hud, does Bette Davis with a more pronounced accent, so it's interesting this project was once intended for Barbara Stanwyck, a very different performer from Davis. Cooper embodies dogged determination in every twitch of his steely jaw. Massey prevaricates and wavers, his ardor aroused by Cooper's individualism, cooled by his loss of prestige when he defies public opinion. He's completely sincere and convincing, from either side of his mouth.
Back in '49, Variety called The Fountainhead's characters "deeply weird," and they are, if you try to understand them as actual people with lives and thoughts and feelings and motivations and backstories. Rand's insistence on fidelity to her dialogue, however, makes plain that these characters function as symbols and ciphers, nothing more. A talented digital manipulator could have some fun rendering each character as a moving label. Cooper would be a talking animation of the phrase "uncompromising individual," where Neal and Massey would be "the fickle love of wealth and power for men who want to use it," and Douglas "the brutality of public opinion and social contracts." Virtually every other character in the movie acts as a living golf tee, setting up the principals' motivations, actions, and words. Even Kent Smith, as Roark's architect frenemy Peter Keating, is little more than a story device with a name.
Approached from most any angle, The Fountainhead is a deeply weird movie. Whatever truth about individualism's accomplishments might exist is so hopelessly ensnared in Rand's black/white, extremist worldview in which we need great and uncompromising strong men to lead us and to act in our good by acting in their own that it's ultimately pointless to try winnowing out any message from the film that is not hopelessly, toxically narcissistic. To me, and to many like me, Rand's ideas exist somewhere between laughable and appalling.
It's tempting to dismiss The Fountainhead as a remarkably well-made yet totally weird monument to vanity, hubris, and the hero-worship of will-to-power, which it is, but 75 million Americans voted to follow the vision of a would-be strongman whose value of the public resulted in over 400,000 deaths due to covid-19, so dismissal might seem shortsighted as of April 2021. It's no longer a film to take lightly.
Which makes it a confounded film, almost what the French call a "damned film," in that, despite featuring strong performances and stylish direction and a propulsive pace, it's not in most senses a particularly good film, but is one I recommend. I'm not sure that quite qualifies it as a damned film, but it lives in the same voting precinct. I enjoyed The Fountainhead, although often because I found myself howling at the unironic self-importance of the characters and the situation - with no offense meant to my designer friends I have never seen a film in which a culture worked itself up to civil unrest over the design of buildings. I liked Neal's weird Bette Davis imitation, and Cooper's ironjawed stolidity, and Massey's eloquent simpering, and Robert Douglas steals every scene. The very premise, however, that dynamiting a public housing project because it added balconies and neoclassical filigree to the buildings so fatally compromised the architect's vision that any consideration of the public has to be secondary, that we need strong and unbending men to invent and design our future because committees always precipitate death, SHOULD define a phrase like "batshit insanity."
Which makes it a confounded film, almost what the French call a "damned film," in that, despite featuring strong performances and stylish direction and a propulsive pace, it's not in most senses a particularly good film, but is one I recommend. I'm not sure that quite qualifies it as a damned film, but it lives in the same voting precinct. I enjoyed The Fountainhead, although often because I found myself howling at the unironic self-importance of the characters and the situation - with no offense meant to my designer friends I have never seen a film in which a culture worked itself up to civil unrest over the design of buildings. I liked Neal's weird Bette Davis imitation, and Cooper's ironjawed stolidity, and Massey's eloquent simpering, and Robert Douglas steals every scene. The very premise, however, that dynamiting a public housing project because it added balconies and neoclassical filigree to the buildings so fatally compromised the architect's vision that any consideration of the public has to be secondary, that we need strong and unbending men to invent and design our future because committees always precipitate death, SHOULD define a phrase like "batshit insanity."
Is the architect going to live in the public housing project? Why does he care the tenants want balconies,? Because he doesn't like the aesthetics? Dafugouddahere.
That, however, is the film's conceit, and the philosophical underpinning for Donald John Trump, Newt Gingrich, and most elected members of the GOP. What the people want is subordinate to one man's vision. If they follow him to glory, the reflected brilliance will make them glorious. Another reviewer of the time called the movie, "openly pro-fascist." Little bit.
Yes, I recommend The Fountainhead. Not as a good movie, in any traditional sense, but as a fascinating piece of allegorical propaganda which, while hilariously absurd, was used as the blueprint by which the 45th POTUS was elevated to power. You'll still laugh - it's impossible not to - but you'll squirm afterward, and you may want a hot bath after the film's end. The Fountainhead is a film to be marvelled at, to be fascinated by, and even, perhaps, frightened of. It is a film to see. Whether it is a film to enjoy and forget about I leave to the viewer.
That, however, is the film's conceit, and the philosophical underpinning for Donald John Trump, Newt Gingrich, and most elected members of the GOP. What the people want is subordinate to one man's vision. If they follow him to glory, the reflected brilliance will make them glorious. Another reviewer of the time called the movie, "openly pro-fascist." Little bit.
Yes, I recommend The Fountainhead. Not as a good movie, in any traditional sense, but as a fascinating piece of allegorical propaganda which, while hilariously absurd, was used as the blueprint by which the 45th POTUS was elevated to power. You'll still laugh - it's impossible not to - but you'll squirm afterward, and you may want a hot bath after the film's end. The Fountainhead is a film to be marvelled at, to be fascinated by, and even, perhaps, frightened of. It is a film to see. Whether it is a film to enjoy and forget about I leave to the viewer.
I'm pretty sure I will be unable to watch this. I have tried to read Rand and cannot do it for the same reason that I won't be able to see this: it's so bad that you want to laugh--you want desperately to laugh--but even 20 years ago I knew people who took Rand in deadly earnest as a prophet, to be worshiped rather than mocked. The reality of these people--who were, to be fair, not-quite-stupid-enough white men in the dangerous part of their twenties and who might have grown out of it, but who might also NOT have--was so horrible to me then, even then, that I can derive no pleasure at all from staring at it. And now? No possible way. I did, however, enjoy this review enormously and hope that reading it can sub for seeing the movie.
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